Sunday 30 December 2012

Christmas Walk Around Round Up

So, here I am. Fresh as a daisy, the day after. A few new places under my belt, and definitely a few more to add to my emergency 'Lost in London and Thirsty' map.

After a bit of a nightmare due to Tube engineering work that were 'planned' but not flagged on the National Rail site, Ian and Julie and I ended up having to take Shanks' Pony to the first stop, the Bavarian Beerhouse in Old Street.

This is a large underground kind of place, and I mean that in terms of its location rather than reputation...I just stopped myself using the term 'bunker' in the context of a recreated Munich beer cellar, that's all. When it gets full, I suspect it is gets warm and noisy. However, we were the first customers in and treated to Erdinger Dunkel and Hefe Weisse to start. I suppose this kind of stuff is all a bit old hat now, but I do like Erdinger, it has just the right balance of banana/clove/bitterness for me. The Dunkel is, perhaps, less refreshing, but the dark malt does add a bit of toastiness that I really like. Anyway, this helped us wash down lunch of schnitzel and an array of sausages, sauerkraut and fries. Great drinking food!

A short step north from here, passing by some very attractive Victorian terraces into an empty space probably forever changed by either 1970's town planners or the Luftwaffe (with the same result one thinks), you arrive at proper old school corner boozer. It sticks out a mile (ma'am), but you also wonder how it does business. Stepping inside, you realise. Voted for again and again by their local CAMRA group, The Wenlock Arms really takes you back. A horseshoe bar dominates, seats against the outer wall with tables and stools. All it really needs is sawdust and a couple of spittoons  and this place is much more at home in 1912 than 2012. The beer was also good, Dark Star APA (has this got a tad weaker? The pump said 4.7%, but I am sure I drank it at 5%) and Rebellion Mild, but there was a selection of about 6 beers. The pub had a few locals and then visitors in, suggesting that people know about this place, which is all to the good. God forbid that we should lose this kind of place! However, if BITE is to be believed it lives in constant threat of 'redevelopment'. Oh, and a final point, the music playing was not obtrusive and great - Fleet Foxes (why do I always think of summer when I hear stuff from their first album , Stones, Elbow, Led Zep (Bron-y-Aur Stomp no less)

From there, we had a 15 minute walk up City Road to Angel - again not a part of the City I am that familiar with. We hit the Old Red Lion Theatre. This was an interesting place, full of period features, but the beer selection was on the popular side (Tribute, Wherry, and TT Landlord). Having said that the Landlord was in fine form; I've had worse pints in so called 'real ale' pubs in Southampton. It was crisp, hoppy with a little hint of sweetness that makes it so drinkable when its good. So no complaints there. The pub was busy, OK there was football on the telly, and then....it emptied. It emptied because, in the corner of the bar, is a box office where you buy tickets to the theatre that sits above it (I assume). An interesting first for me, and Julie has threatened to visit again next year for their Christmas show. I am just hoping that the punters hadn't been told this was West End show!

Ever onwards, we started our descent into the City. A few rights and lefts found us in northern Clerkenwell (I suppose) at the Pakenham Arms. Again, for mid afternoon on a Saturday between Christmas and NYE, the pub was quiet, with  dozen or so 'locals' at the bar - but no less welcoming for this! Julie tried the Sharps wheat beer, which was an interesting beer (none of the wheat beer of earlier in the day, this is a clean, slightly sweetish pale beer with a bit of bubblegum rather than the more interesting banana/clove thing). Ian and I opted for a pint of Nemophilia from the Botanist Brewery, based along the Thames in Kew. This was lovely, dark, roasty but not too bitter, and I am interested to try some of their other beers if they are of this quality. This pub was accompanied by some beer tapas (wasabi peas and crisps!), and another non-obtrusive but fantastic music selection (Stones, The Who, Pink Floyd....have these pubs raided my music collection?). Again, not an area I tend to visit too often, but the pub was great and would definitely go back!

There was a real sense of heading home, as we we took a short walk towards Lamb's Conduit Street, and went into The Lamb. We had been here last year, and it seemed a good place to stop before pressing on towards our final stop. Young's Winter Warmer was our tipple here - nice, but I always think it could do with being a but stronger and fruitier for a real winter ale. The pub was much busier this year than last and MUCH warmer - look, even Julie felt warm, so it must have been hot.

And then, finally, a dash through the rain towards Clerkenwell Road, and Leather Lane's Craft Beer Co. This has been recommended to me so many times, I knew I had to visit this soon. We managed to find a seat to perch on, as it was rather busy, and we spent a bit of time choosing our beer. The Craft Beer Co summed up everything I love and hate about the 'craft beer' thing. The beer was lovely....no scrub that...it was, in fact, gorgeous. But, at that price, so it bloody should be! We had three rounds here, and I managed to sample halves of the Mikkeller Milk Stout (utterly superb, really well balanced), a double IPA from Southern Tier in the US (resinous, pine, orange, amazing), and a final beer of Against The Grain's 'Scottish Charred' (a lovely sweet smoked beer, which does not predominate but does go on.....and on).

And my gripe? Not the quality? Not they hype? Not the beer snobbishness? No, just the bloody price ticket. In every pub, 2 pints and a half had come to less than £10 - that's not bad for Southampton let alone London, these days. But here, three halves came to £12-15. Utterly shocking! Yes, I know it's a prime location. Yes, I know these kegged beers have come in from abroad. Yes, I know some of these 'different', maybe even 'not to be tried again'. But, please! If you peruse the bottle list, it gets worse, with some bottles coming in at over £30. As I read this out aloud, I am sure I saw Dick Turpin leave through the back door. This is not about me being a skinflint or not appreciating 'craftmanship' or 'quality', this goes to the heart of my point last month. Beer in this guise is becoming a rather effete, middle-class product. That means those who cannot afford this kind of money end up drinking cheap, bland, mass produced pop. That is not only bad for choice, it's bad for beer.

Anyway, rant over (again). We finished up and Dr B headed North for Low Speedlink through the MEdway towns, whilst we walked up to Holborn and tubes to Waterloo, destination south coast. A great day - 3 miles, 6 pubs, 8 hours. We went from the swank of craft to the sawdust of Wenlock, through the gentrified Victorian streets via the Munich Beer Halls. Here's to another in 2013.

Friday 28 December 2012

Christmas Crawl 2012

Oh yes....it's that time of year again. Time to scour the streets of London for a few interesting and recommended pubs. This year, there is a real mixed bag, some of which come from Pollard and McGinn's 'Around London in 80 beers', some from 'Beer in the Evening', and others from sheer pragmatism and the need to cut down walking times during a day that looks as if it will not be blessed with great weather tomorrow!

Our journey starts at Old Street, yet again in a part of town I do not know, and then heads north west, then south west, ending up in Clerkenwell (kind of). In between we should experience, a proper boozer, an old theatre  a Munich styled beer hall, and a homage to the craft beer revolution. The trip will look something like this:


View Christmas Crawl 2012 in a larger map

We start at the Bavarian Beerhouse on City Road. Alledgedly, we should be experiencing a bit of Deutsch Gastlichkeit whilst there; wheat beers and plenty of pork products - you know the thing....looks a bit restauranty, but we'll give it a go. A short walk north sees us at the Wenlock Arms. This looks like a really old school corner boozer, so I hope it's friendly. It has appeared in the Good Pub Guide numerous times, so I am expecting a  good pint at least! Then we plough on to towards Angel, and stop at the Old Red Lion, a bar/pub in a theatre (we shall come across this kind of things again, later!). I think it is fair to say that these three represent a bit of a 'give it a go' choice of places for a pint this year. They may be great, they be pants, but that's kind of what these crawls have become about. If they are good, they end up on my master map of London pubs, which always comes in handy in times of thirst in the Smoke.

The final three pubs represent something a little more familiar. A decent stroll from the Angel sees us in the north part of Clerkenwell, in the Pakenham Arms. Looks a little more 'up market', but the bottled selection looks good, and I am promised (according to the blurb) of a changing roster of draught beers. Certainly the photos suggest a good selection. Looking forward to that one. Continuing our walk south west, towards Bloomsbury, we end up at The Lamb in Lamb's Conduit Street. We went there last year, to this pub with an old theatre upstairs and fantastic tiled outer aspect. Hoping Young's Winter Warmer is on, and up to snuff, but I liked its cosy green leathered interior. Then, tiredly, we will make our way towards Holborn, and finish in the Craft Beer Company in Leather Lane. A new one on me, but this comes very recommended, and I am looking to spend a few minutes perusing my beer menu before making my final choice(s) of the day.

As ever, I'll be on Twitter as I go around

Saturday 15 December 2012

AG #11 - Wailing Bike

With a number of important points learned from the last two brews (namely watch your carbonation, and late hopping is great), I sat down to plan out this years Winter beer.....it was supposed to be Christmas, but I kind of got around to this a little late.

I decided to roll with what I had, a load of pale malt, a vial of White Labs WLP500 Trappist yeast, and a pile of New Zealand Motueka hops from the dark saison I had brewed a while back (which has now been fully road tested, and no one has died). I supplemented this list with a bit of crystal, liking the colouring it gave to the Bluebird clone I had brewed, some light Belgian Candy sugar, and a smidgen of torrified wheat for a bit of head retention. The recipe is here.

As you can see, if all goes to plan, this is a it of a mighty beer. One to very much sup and savour. The tropical notes of the hops should work well in a Belgian beer, according to their blurb, so here goes.

Brew day went without much of a hitch. I also decided to forego my recent ritual of boiling my water and instead opted for using Carbonate Reduction Solution (CRS) to get my alkalinity down. Whatever is in this stuff really works, according to my test kits. A few millilitres in 20 litres of water, and the alkalinity has dropped by an order of magnitude. I look forward to easier brew days from now on.

I forgot to make a yeast starter too. Don't usually bother with White Labs stuff, but this is such a strong beer that more beasties would have helped. I thought I had killed the blighters, and, eventually, took to putting the beer in the airing cupboard after 24 hours. After about 72 hours, I spotted the first hint of krausen, which developed through the day. Once this subsided, the whole beer became alive.....and I am now a bit worried.

I'm a tad concerned now that this is TOO active, the temperature too high. I know that fermenting high gives really fruity esters, especially with these yeasts, but too much can really kill the beer. Certainly, when I removed the lid, the smell was AMAZING....fruity hops and bananas from the yeast. It is now back in the kitchen, and it is still fizzing away. Hope this beer doesn't turn into solvent!

My other worry is the masses of crud that I have generated, presumably from cold break material. I hope this stuff settles out somehow, otherwise this will not drink well! In the relative cool of the kitchen, it now seems to have crashed a little, and I will take a week-on gravity reading soon. I can see some of this stuff settling out....if it doesn't compact well, I may only have 5 litres of this to drink.

Mind you, at that strength, this may be a bonus. Please send all small bottles direct to me.....don't reckon a pint of this will a good idea!

Oh, and a free bottle if you can guess from the above why this beer is so named...

 

Friday 7 December 2012

The Session #70 – Don’t Believe The Hype


Hype?

Well, I’ll probably get hammered for this, and there is an element of me being contentious for its own sake (because I DO like much of the stuff I taste!), but can I suggest the most over-hyped beery thing is the term ‘craft’ and the stuff that sits around it!

It’s a meaningless term. It is generally defined as something you do with skill and by hand. So, can someone tell me how the ‘craft’ of brewing a pint of Banks’ Mild is less than that of making a beer with ‘bucketloads’ of hops before ageing it in the stomachs of Bactrian Camels? How can a brewery so aggressive in its defence of the term ‘craft’, defined in the US as ‘small, independent and traditional’, pump out around 2.5 million litres of product, ripping up everything we know about ‘style’? (a hateful word, anyway)? It isn’t that, to quote Brewdog, ‘real ale no longer means anything’, it is that the term ‘craft’ has been misrepresented, incorrectly used, and been foisted on drinkers as a marketing ploy, in a cynical attempt by brewers to entice the weak willed into buying their product.

And, as we (and I have been there too, comrades) get drawn into the seedy guerrilla marketing world of ‘craft’, we become involved in the beer-porn universe they want us to inhabit. For the analogy bears some testing. You start off, perhaps dissatisfied with the pint in your local, professing it to be brown and bland. You find, lurking in some recesses of the Beeriverse, an old bottle of some kind of IPA, packed with New World hops. You drink. You savour. No one need know. It’s your little secret; American beer isn’t that bad after all. However, soon, a beer spurting with Amarillo no longer thrills; you need to move on. Before you know it, you are drinking a Saison, flavoured with creosote, brewed on the auspicious day of the Great Farting, filtered through the gusset of a pair of tights worn by Betty Grable, and delivered by water cannon fired by homeless Ugandans. And we can tell our mates about it. And we can metaphorically say ‘Fuck You! I drank a PHENOMENAL beer that was only PHENOMENAL when I drank it…it is now shite, and you can’t have it!’

Why am I so exercised? Jealousy? That I cannot afford the £45 a bottle price tag? Hurt pride? That I can never brew beer like that? Not really. It’s more like the spicy hit of tedium, aged with chippings of concern.

Tedium. Tedium, because all of a sudden beer is starting to gain the caché of wine. Even CAMRA support that kind of thing. However, we now talk about beer pairings, artisan manufacture, and is someone going to say terroir soon? As a geographer, I really want to think about beer as a geographical entity; the hydrogeology of water supply, the transport of ingredients and product, the historical context, the environmental footprint, the way beer permeates parts of our social fabric and how that has changed over time. As a drinker, I just want a good, tasty pint, well kept! When I go to the pub I want to leave the academic stuff behind (that’s my day job!), and sup a beer and think ‘Mmm, I could have another of them….’ Don’t get me wrong, I am happy for people to taste and describe. I belong to the Scotch Malt Whiskey Society, and some of their tasting notes make Gilly Goolden blush. But, sometimes, over-analysis tells us nothing. You’ve just got to taste it yourself. And I don’t care what you think.

Concern. Well, because some proponents of the term ‘craft’, seem to have forgotten the roots of the drink they so love. And this has built a sort of ‘beer snob’ culture that I hate. I get accused of being a ‘beer snob’ because I turn my nose up at a pint of Worthy CreamFlow, but by ‘dissing’ lots of small, regional, truly traditional breweries who put out stuff many are now seeing as ‘bland and brown’, means that the real essence of the craft could be lost, at least to the many. Beer IS a simple product; the ingredients are few and common, and the process not that difficult – after all many households made their own in times gone by. But the present shift of the ‘craft’ movement towards chucking everything at it from coffee grinds to printer cartridges (‘ummm…yes…wait…I’m getting hints of the HP Magenta ink circa ‘95…’), means that they are actually making brewing a far more arcane activity, as if these brewers have some divine connection to Ninkasi, and marking the product up accordingly.

Beer, and brewing, is about democracy. Firstly, like any good democracy, you participate; not just in the process of selection but in the creation of product. There are aspects of the ‘craft’ industry where this is just as alien as the so called ‘regionals’ or ‘nationals’. Don’t get me wrong, there are both ‘craft’ and ‘non-craft’ areas that get this right, but neither can claim the moral high ground. Secondly, beer is democratic in that you choose to like it and choose what to like. At GBBF this year, a thoroughly decent ‘regional’ introduced us to a new range of beers laced with New World hops. They were, in my opinion, pretty rank. Or, at least, much worse than either the bitter or dark mild they had brewed for generations. Even they had been seduced by the ‘movement’! Even worse, could there be a time when I can no longer choose their ‘boring, brown and bland bitter’ over these new brews? All of a sudden, this lack of beery competition is sounding like taste autocracy!

I could go on. But you have probably nodded off into your exquisitely fluted glass of fermented yaks horn, barrel aged in the sewers of Paris, and fermented under strict conditions of 24 hour Popul Vuh records being played at barely audible volumes.
Cheers.